Amen, brother.

I’m back on the lam, and escaped from home detention
I’m back in the van, and I’m paying off my pension
Come down from your throne, it’s an ugly aberration
Come ‘round to the show, we’re an over-nite sensation.
- The Monarchs, 2001

Funny the things you remember about people, the stuff that triggers things in your mind. Certain turns of phrase, like Super Dave’s bottomless pit of splice-engineered swearwords. ('Jesus suffering arseburgling goatfisting fuck... your Honour.') Combos of clothing, like the Bear’s uniform of cargo shorts, beach sandals and lairy Hawaiian shirts, which saw him through South Island winters as loyally as they had North Queensland summers. Or even stuff as simple as the way someone drives. I always reckoned the way someone drove was a marker of their personality. The Duffer drove with only a casual interest in proceedings, whereas for McCarthy, every drive was Bathurst, or maybe Targa Tasmania; every corner was a apex to be attacked, every traffic light a dragstrip in waiting, every other road user a moron, mobile chicane or muppet to be sledged with extreme prejudice. Jeff drove like a farmer - slowly, in the middle of the road, holding up traffic. Beth's driving had always been mental, which should have told me something. And Brady Priddle drove like an ignorant, obnoxious arsehole.

As for Marty, whether at the wheel of the 1976 Datsun 180B (baby-poo beige with a vinyl roof) he’d inherited from his nonna in the Chateau Dodgy days, or today’s trip southwards in a weapons-grade, five-hundred-horsepower '07 BMW M5, he remained… economical. Surgically precise with his steering inputs, breathing in and out of the throttle, eking out each last drop of fuel economy which could be extracted. It still pulled like a freight train in any gear, even with a bootload of amps and guitars – the mere fact we’d managed to cram two overnight bags, three amps, two guitars, one bass, and two thirty-something loons into it was almost as astonishing as the way it surged for the horizon the instant Marty picked up the throttle, even as gingerly as that was.

When it came to Gasket bandwagons, this was the ultimate, as we were discussing while the miles ticked past on the Tugun bypass. We’d already passed another traditional Gasket milestone, for me at least – hearing our new song on the radio while cruising down the road. As with most things, it wasn’t quite as frantic as the first time – hammering down the Goonellabah hillside with Harold Holt blaring from the old Skyline’s speakers, courtesy Triple Z FM – but it produced the usual effect. Giggling.

“I can’t fucking believe they’re playing this,” I declared, as the airwaves telecast Marty and myself bellowing our heartfelt tribute to girls who like it pink and juicy, medium rare, and/or in some form of torpedo arrangement.

“Yeah, giving it a bit of a caning apparently…”

“Wouldn’t have thought the target demographic would have taken to it.”

“You think?” mused Marty. “How old are you, Angus?”

“You know, mate, thirty-two. Same as you...”

He shot me a dirty look, because he hadn’t turned thirty yet - that was coming later in the month - and he knew I knew. Furthermore, I knew he knew I knew, to misconstrue Tex Perkins appallingly. Marty and the Duffer were a couple years younger than me, and always had been (surprisingly enough) – they’d still been undergrads when Sam McCarthy and I had joined them at Chateau Dodgy in Lismore, what was now a bit over ten years before.

“So how old do you think the average age of the Triple J audience is?”

“Twenty… something. Late twenties,” I corrected myself, sensing I was being set up.

Marty shook his head with a grin. “Thirty-one.”

“Jesus,” I remarked. “Either radio’s only for the elderly, or a certain youth network’s failing its remit.”

“Little from column A, little from column B I’d say.”

The tunnel under Coolangatta airport – or the corner of it the RTA couldn’t be arsed detouring around because of some endangered frog or lizard or lesser-spotted dung warbler or something – loomed before us. With half a grin, Marty flicked his window down, and having been pre-warned, I followed. All of a sudden, driving for economy went out the window. What came back in the window was that astonishing banshee howl of the M5’s V10, smacked down two gears and kicked in the guts, doing its best early-Noughties Formula One impression. It. Fucking. WAILED. Hairs up on the back of the neck, the works. Yet no sooner had we burst back into daylight with the speeds starting to near Good Cunting, Mornstable levels than the throttle was salved, the windows were back up and all was sensible and grown-up again. Marty’s hooligan streak was very ruthlessly controlled, but it was there.

“It’s all relative, though,” I observed, returning to our original discussion point. “All the bandwagons had their advantages. The postie van, that thing just purred along. Fitted a bunch of gear too. Your old man’s ‘Cruiser was a tank of a thing. McCarthy’s Camira was…”

“A shitbox,” Marty quipped. “Then we had that Volvo, fitted a lot of stuff, but even McCarthy drove that like an old grannie. It was like driving around in a rental car without the excess reduction coverage. We were paranoid about scratching it. Or at least I was.”

“Yeah. I preferred driving around in the car with the flag on the bonnet.”

This, then, was a Serious Car. It fitted the nature of the position I’d found myself in. This was Serious Business. There was none of the well-meaning, do-it-yourself amateurism of the early days with Exocet – shambles it together but try and pretend we’re professionals – or the laissez-faire, it’s-only-money chaos and decadence of the Intercom era. We were now under the umbrella of dB Entertainment Proprietary Limited, and there was to be no fucking about. The first memorandum from head office had arrived barely an hour after Marty’s phonecall of the previous Friday afternoon, direct from the desk of the Executive Director (Talent Management). The documentation, a signed letter in PDF format, had arrived by email, requiring acknowledgement within the hour otherwise follow-up communication would be initiated to ensure receipt. Attached to the email was a copy of the press release which was simultaneously being distributed to all relevant media outlets, which spoke in glowing, effervescent terms about how utterly thrilled dB Entertainment were with the opportunity for Flange Gasket to play at the Big Day Out of Summer 2009. The communique to us, the three remaining monkeys of Flange Gasket, was… not as glowing, effervescent, phosphorescent or even remotely luminous. ‘Businesslike’ would have been charitable. Jeff said he’d expected to see ‘For Your Eyes Only’ stamped on it somewhere, and possibly for it to self-destruct at some point.

Andrew, Philip and Jeffery
As you will by now be aware, dB Entertainment have been prevailed upon by Exocet Records to permit Flange Gasket to perform at the forthcoming Big Day Out festival in New Zealand and the East Coast of Australia. Due to extraordinary circumstances, and following discussions with the Director, we have agreed to this…

“Discussions?” The Director shrugged. “I wasn’t even in the meeting. Pretty glad too, Mads had a face like death the rest of that weekend…”

As time is of the essence, we propose the following arrangements to enable all logistical concerns to be efficiently dealt to. As ownership of the name ‘Flange Gasket’ is vested with us, it follows that we shall manage and represent the band in the short-term period surrounding the festival, thereafter we are open to negotiation. This is primarily to ensure delivery of service and resource to the band during the period of preparation and rehearsal, and reflects no continuing commercial interests on our part…

“Kretin’s fucking ticked,” I noted. Jeff had called on Saturday morning, bemused by the localised nuclear explosion which Maddy’s epistle had created. “He seems to think he still owns the Duff and the Jeff forever-and-ever-amen through Spam Filter...”

“He’ll get shot down, you know it,” Marty predicted. “He knows it too, probably just looking for a sweetener to send him on his way. Mads will spot him two bucks fifty and half a pack of Dunhills and he’ll bugger off.”

“Didn’t know she was that charitable?” I grinned. “Other than hooking up with you, of course…”

Three days of rehearsals have been set aside at Firstlight Studios, St Helena, from January 6 through 8. If these dates are problematic please contact our office at your earliest possible convenience…

“Why Firstlight? Why not Sound Investment?”

“Sound Investment has been given the Finger.” Bernard and the lads had pre-booked the facility for most of the month, working on demos for their next (and as it turned out, last) album. “Plus Firstlight’s handier for the other two.”

“At least means Phil should know what’s going on, given we’re down the road from his house and playing in the studio which keeps him on as knob-twiddler in residence.”

“You want to make that bet? I’m happy to shake on it…”

Your management liaison with dB Entertainment will be Josephine Fang, whose contact details are attached; she will be in touch in the very near future with further details. Your A&R liaison at Exocet remains Daniela Selinic…

“Cardinal Fang!” declared Marty, when I asked after our new ‘management liaison’. “Joey’s good. Very good. A bit… random, maybe, but to be honest, she’s probably the only one in that office who you’d hand the job of sorting out an entire band’s shit in the two weeks before they play BDO – contracts, insurance, merchandise, media liaison, record company liaison, everything. Of all of them, she’d just power through. Very media savvy, good contact base. And she’s used to working ridiculous hours and getting paid bugger all. Came to us from Triple J, after all.”

“Good head for radio?”

“Good head for a lot of things. Erm, not like that… She’s part Chinese, part Ukrainian. Said she was random didn’t I? Looks more the former than the latter, but very striking, nonetheless.”

“A take-charge Asian babe… are we going to need to keep Phil locked in the boot for the duration?”

“Very probably.”

From Marty’s description, Cardinal Fang sounded like she was very a lot of stuff. She’d need to be. And judging from the swathe of follow-up correspondence which had been distributed with military precision across the weekend, she was onto it. It was now mid-afternoon Monday and I was feeling vaguely guilty I hadn’t checked my email or my phone messages since Marty and I had set off from his place in New Farm after lunch. The morning had been taken up with media appearances – Triple J, Triple M and Nova breakfast, press interviews and a recorded piece for Channel Ten news for that evening – plus a humanitarian mission to the River City Rock Centre to throw myself on the mercy of long-term proprietor Big Al Pavlovich. After much bowing, scraping and pleading, he agreed to lend me a shiny black trapezoidal-pickup Gibson SG, similar to the one of Hollywood’s I’d used in NZ, and a Peavey 6135 amp (basically the same as the old 5150, but Eddie Van Halen took the 5150 branding as his own intellectual property when he split from Peavey to market his own amps) for the week, if only to get me out of his shop, salivating over his guitars and scaring away his actual customers. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was far too broke to be considering buying anything for quite some time, at least until the first downpayment for my BDO services reached the bank – a large slab of which was going belatedly to the bank for my mortgage, of course. You might have thought that proper guitarists would need more than one axe to carry them through Big Day Out, particularly (nominally) lead guitarists, but I was a Flange Gasket guitarist. Fuck that. That’s money we could spend on piss, dammit.

I was having to work for my money, too. Apart from the initial work we’d done in Brisbane, it’d been made clear that I was going to be bearing most of the burden of front-man duties, at least in terms of media appearances. Marty had enough to do with his own stuff, the Jeff was largely unknown, and the Duffer couldn’t be relied upon to be awake when the likes of Triple J Breakfast called in for a report, so it was left to me to carry the can. My schedule (as determined by Maddy and Cardinal Fang) was already booked out for most of the two weeks leading up our flight to Auckland for BDO Matchday 1, and my scheduled promotional commitments seemed to total quite a lot longer than my actual practising-the-motherfucking-guitar commitments, at least in terms of official, entire-band rehearsal slots. I was even supposed to be writing a regular blog on our brand-spanking new website, linked through from our various social networking presences (Arsebook, NoSpace etc) and our Exocet artist page. So far, I’d just done what McCarthy used to do when writing our online updates back in the day (it was his job, and he was welcome to it): crap on about whatever random stuff came off the top of one’s head. Like this morning, in between breakfast radio call-ins.

G’day campers. Nobody bought my house yesterday, so bugger the lot of youse. Today the Teenage Heartthrob and me are media-whoring it up a treat across the city of Brisvegas; Premier Pete, patron saint of media sluts, would have been proud. Apologies to all those morning radio listeners who were hoping for some form of coherent conversational content with their Weetbix. It’s not likely to improve for Jays listeners, they seem to want me back intermittently to report on Things Gasketlicious, at least until we fade back into irrelevance immediately after our Melbourne BDO show. It is slightly concerning that I am considered the only responsible grown-up left on the premises once you take the Teenage Heartthrob out of the room, usually so he can go and practice his moves on Guitar Hero in front of his bedroom mirror. He is soooo looking forward to getting out front and throwing some Big Rock Shapes with weapon in hand (ahem) it’s faintly disturbing. We may need a chiropractor before rehearsals are out.

Speaking of the ‘Throb, our Marty has been very distressed to hear his name linked with the release of a reprehensibly poor rock and roll song about rural chicks who eat a lot of red meat, as played by people who should know better on the National Yoof Broadcaster, and associated with a new film by renown auteur and smallgoods cognescenti Mr Gerard Costello, titled ‘Real Girls Eat Meat’. Cogniscent of this, Martin and myself would like to take this opportunity to disavow all knowledge and/or responsibility from the release of the single ‘Beef Week Queen’ from the EP of the same name, by a pair of reprobates calling themselves ‘Never Mind The Bullocks’. Yes, we’d like to disavow all knowledge and/or responsibility, but given we wrote and recorded the bastard I’m not sure how persuasive our defence is going to look in the court of public opinion. Song fucken rips though ay.

I went out with a former Beef Week Queen once. She was lovely. Particularly with a honey and soy marinade… but that’s a story for another time. Probably after Big Dog goes to bed, given the likely censorship rating.

Later this morning, after conversing with the best and brightest music journalists the Australian print media has to offer, and Kas Casoli of the Courier Mail, Marty and I are off southward in his ostentacious Teutonic uber-taxi to collect the rest of the lads and convene at the secret mountain lair of the evil Cardinal Fang, to receive our next lot of orders for Flange Gasket’s complete and brutal subjugation of the known universe. MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Hopefully Phil will be out of bed by then.

Angus is going now.

PS Go buy something attractively affordable and/or competitively priced from Big Al at River City Rock Centre in Brisbane. He’s real nice, don’t let the tatts, halitosis and BO put you off.

“Does Joey know you guys call her Cardinal Fang?” I wondered aloud.

“She does now,” Marty noted.

I wondered whether Josephine Fang was the sort of girl with which nicknames of any sort would sit well, let alone obscure ones unearthed from Monty Python sketches. She seemed very organised, very focused, and very serious. I was also wondering whether Marty would give me a steer of the M5, but somehow I doubted it.

When I’d first moved to Brisbane, getting down to the coast was a complete shitfight. The entire Pacific Highway from the Northern Rivers to the Riverside Expressway seemed to be in a perpetual state of roadworks, with construction of the M1 from the Gold Coast north seemingly taking most of the late ‘90s. Throw in the fiddly bits over the Burringbar range (the coast road was faster, even though you had to trundle through all those pretty-but-speed-limiting little beachside villages like Hastings Point and Pottsville) and the carpark that constituted the run through Tugun past Coolangatta Airport, and you had a drive that should have taken three hours which often took at least an hour longer. At the worst of it, I was taking the sinuous, hairy-arsed, intermittently sealed Lions Road over the range between Beaudesert and Kyogle in order to get down to the farm for weekend work or surf trips during uni semesters, rather than watch the temp gauge on the Atomic Mandarin (the original Torana version, not the Ibanez tribute) ascending to the skies on the slow crawls through roadworks. Or just because it was fun, particularly on the Suzuki RG250 I briefly held onto.

Of course, these days it was dual carriageway the whole way to Byron, from the Stanley St on-ramp (easiest point of access from Marty’s place at New Farm – over the Story Bridge and onto the freeway) pretty much all the way to the St Helena turnoff just up the hill after the Byron exit, and the trip took barely two hours. I figured the M5 wouldn’t have minded an attack on the Lions Road, though, particularly now it was sealed all the way along. To which Marty wryly admitted to having already ticked that box, one sunny Sunday when Maddy was out of town on business and wasn’t around to complain about his driving making her carsick. Good lad.

Even though our official dB Entertainment schedule didn’t have us starting rehearsals until tomorrow morning, we’d figured catching up at Firstlight beforehand was probably a good idea, if only to compare notes and develop our plan of attack before our corporate minders turned up tomorrow morning. Marty and I arrived early, courtesy our good run down the freeway. Jeff, being a farmer, turned up more-or-less on time. The Duffer, being useless, didn’t turn up at all. We stood around outside Firstlight, kicking the gravel on the driveway – Marty had the keys, so we could have gone in, but I wasn’t really in any hurry – marking time with Gasket’s favourite sport of years past, slagging off Phil for being useless. After half an hour of standing around, finally some action. Except it was a refrigerator-white Toyota Camry hire car which was trundling into sight, not a graphite-black Nissan GT-R, which either meant the Duffer had suffered a spontaneous personality bypass ref. vehicle choice, or our corporate minders had been tipped off that we were trying to steal a march on us…

“Cardinal Fang, is it?” she snarled.

Josephine Fang was striking all right. She looked like she’d be up on a striking charge at the tribunal, if Danno would let her at me. Joey was five feet of punk rock fury - a well-worn Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, ripped black jeans held together with patches and gaffa tape, seriously violent looking bovver boots and an array of ear, nose, lip and belly piercings which would have surely troubled the metal detector folks at Sydney Airport. A purple-blue streak slashed through her severely chopped shoulder-length black hair, but you’d have never called it ‘emo’. Mainly because she’d have bitten your face off. She looked like fun, anyway. Not the sort of fun I actively sought out these days, but hey.

“Hey, don’t look at me,” I grinned. “Talk to your boss here.”

Marty’s eyes went like dinner plates, and he dived back behind the BMW to pretend to look for something very important hidden deep in the boot recesses.

“Look, hero,” she remarked, indicating me with a black-painted fingernail. “Fuck with me today and you’ll cop a lot more than the comfy chair and the soft fuckin’ cushions, yeah?”

“Sir! Yes, Sir!”

“That’s better,” she grinned. There was something about her, I just liked her straight away. Short, feisty girls were all through my past - usually more as mates than as dates, but the history was hard to argue with. It wasn’t that I wanted to bang her, though - that wasn’t the way it worked. (Then again, I hadn’t wanted to bang Lauren straight off, and how’d that turned out? Interestingly.) Anyway we’d clicked immediately, which was going to make this a whole lot more fun. Despite Marty’s warnings of randomness, I’d had visions of some dreary, beige, accountant-type person, judging by the dispassionate, over-engineered tone of her organisational emails. She’d obviously been better briefed as to what to expect from me, given the liberties she was already diving into, studs-up.

“You boys are very keen,” Danno remarked. “We’re not starting until tomorrow, you know…”

“Yeah,” Jeff replied, “but Angus here reckoned we needed to get in early and develop a plan on how we were going to deal with being ordered around by women. Don’t see a problem myself - used to it, Marty too probably…”

“Jeff,” I said, “that’s a fairly shit attempt at sledging, and you know it.”

“Yeah, it is. I’ll try harder next time. You fat wanker.”

“You’re short,” Joey remarked.

“So are you. Those Docs ain’t fooling anyone.”

“Fuck off. You’re short one. Where’s Phil?”

“Dunno. I emailed him,” Marty said. “Told him we were meeting here at four. His time.”

“I texted him,” I added.

“I emailed and texted him,” the Jeff offered.

“Stalker…”

“Nah, just that I’m the one with the most experience of actually dealing with the bastard in the recent past.”

“Fair enough. Shall we wander up the hill and kick his door in?”

“Just his door? Not his teeth?”

“We’ll see how things go, yeah?”

The Duffer staggered out of bed. The sight of him scratching himself in nothing but dubiously stained grey boxers would have turned the stomach of stauncher men than any of us, Joey included.

“We’re playing Big Day Out? Awesome! When did that get decided?”

Jesus Christ. His phone, apparently, had been ‘lost’. His computer had ‘died’. Both of which meant he’d broken them entirely trying to fix them partially. I could have killed him. However I’d probably have had to taken a number and stood in line, had I really wanted to. Daniela, who was just about the only one of us who was capable of retaining her professionalism at that instant in time, gently relayed the edited highlights of the approximately seventy-two emails, calls and text messages which he had missed to date. Only most of which had originated from Joey.

“Rehearsals tomorrow?” Phil mused. “Bewdy, but I’ll just have to head up to Casino to fix a mate’s computer… then I’m supposed to be meeting a girl and dropping back a demo CD in Lismore on the way back…”

“Phil,” directed Joey, “you won’t be heading to Casino. And you won’t be heading to Lismore. You will be at Firstlight at nine tomorrow morning. Showered, shaved, with your drumkit, ready to practice. Is that understood?”

He nodded meekly.

“I’m glad we understand each other,” Joey nodded.

“Fuck it,” I said, “since we’re all here, we may as well lug in and set up this evening, save time tomorrow. I mean, that’s what you guys are here trying to do, yeah?”

“Commandeering the office for the week, yeah,” Joey replied, to Danno’s assent. “Remote operations HQ. We’ve got shitloads to do, figured it was easier to do with you guys in the next room.”

“Besides,” Danno added coolly, “I thought it’d be a worthwhile experience for Joey to meet you guys and see exactly what she’s been working eighteen hour days for this past two weeks…” Danno wasn’t a blood relative of Richie Richardson, of course, but she’d somehow managed to inherit his sense of humour: blackly ironic.

Joey rolled her eyes. “Is this one going to be able to deal with a change in plan?”

“Huh?” said Phil.

“Speak slowly,” I suggested. “Small words, big hand gestures.”

“Phil. Shower. Less than ten minutes. Clothes. Drum kit. Meet at Firstlight. Thirty minutes. Understand?”

He nodded, with a rather glazed-looking stare.

“See you boys down there,” Joey declared, and she and Danno vacated the scene.

Phil’s eyes still seemed glazed over, possibly permanently.

“Duffstar… you OK?”

“I think I’m in love, hey,” Phil mumbled.

“Have I forgotten anything?” I asked myself, double-checking the plugs for the amp.

“Kicking it down the stairs?” Joey suggested.

“Quiet from the cheap seats,” I muttered.

“Hey, it wasn’t you who had to get Big Al’s best technician in on his New Year hols to glue the fucker back together so that Reid Burton couldn’t tell you kicked the shit out of it, was it?”

“Yeah, fuckin’ glamourous job this music business isn’t it?” Still, I was impressed with her ability to sort shit out at very short notice. Particularly when it meant I didn’t necessarily have to put a replacement 5150 amp on my already stressed Visa, depending on how well the RC’s stealth repair job held.

“You usually run an Orange Overdrive 120 combo though, yeah?”

I nodded, impressed. “Did for many years. Now parked in Richie’s office.”

She nodded. “Got an Overdrive 80. Early ‘70s, ‘73 I think. Someone told me Orange changed the circuit wiring in the mid-‘70s and the later ones don’t sound as dynamic, but that sounds like a load of wank. Supposedly you can get them re-wired to the original circuit…”

“Mine was a ‘90s reissue,” I conceded, which was like admitting the genuine, authentic, papally blessed Shroud of Turin on my wall was actually a tea towel with interesting water damage. I was never that comfortable in the realms of Equipment Wank – given my ‘don’t care as long as it’s loud’ attitude to gear, entering into these sorts of discussions felt like bringing a butter knife to a gunfight. “And yeah, I’ve been told a lot of toss about how this or that version sounds better, usually by crusty old has-beens with an interest in offloading some prehistoric amp onto me. Had a couple over the years, but the original one is with Richie, sold the others to cover my gambling debts and my smack addiction.”

“That was with the Ibanez? The Atomic Mandarin?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What were you using the OD80 with?”

“Electric viola,” she replied, as though that was the most rational answer one could expect from such a question. “Don’t fucking say it. You so much as mention Vanessa Mae and I’ll…”

“Bond me to something?” I suggested.

“Them too.” She looked me squarely in the eye, daring me to taunt her. The best defence is offence, and noone did offensiveness quite like Joey. “We’re a little... harder. Hell for Leatherface. Four-piece industrial thrash punk with orchestral overtones.”

Hell for Leatherface? Why not Hell Bent For Leatherface? Rob Halford would have been proud.

“Sounds… awful.”

“It’s meant to be. All great art is meant to challenge, to be confronting.”

“I thought all great art is meant to be accessible?” I replied. “Isn’t that why all galleries have wheelchair ramps?”

“Oh fuck that’s awful,” she moaned. “Screw this, I’m off to do my actual job.” She went off to find Danno, pursued by my growled vocal line: “Hell bent, hell bent for LEATHER!” Accompanied, on Big Al’s Gibson SG, by the noodley guitar line that led on from it. Except somewhat buggered up, as you’d expect from me. At least the bastard was plugged in properly. If nothing else, Joey had proved her worth in the audio engineering stakes. I bashed through the Datsuns’ Harmonic Generator, that being the biggest, dumbest riff that came to mind at that instant in time, declared myself satisfied and set the musical equipment aside for the evening. Our official dB Entertainment schedule might not have listed getting a feed in and knocking back a few ales, but sure as fuck our Official Flange Gasket Terms of Reference had that listed somewhere under Standard Operating Procedures. It was enshrined into our constitution, I was pretty sure.

Sunset over the deck at Firstlight was still one of the unclaimed wonders of the world. Particularly since Danno had brought a couple of bottles of very drinkable Margaret River red in her luggage, courtesy Richie, or courtesy Richie and Don’s other brother Pete who owned a winery in those parts. We cracked the red – an ‘05 cab sauv merlot, indicating good things can come from adding a bit of everything you have in the shed – and shared it around in plastic cups on the deck.

Brother Jeffery had my six. “Alright my son?”

“My son? You been talking to Fungus or something?”

“Pretty sure he’s in the 'Stan these days yeah?”

“You may well speak the truth,” I told him. Fungus was an Army mechanic these days. “Yeah, I’m alright, why expect any less?”

“Figured this joint doesn’t bring back the best of memories.”

I’d been trying to cover that up, to be honest. Crappily, it would seem.

“Long time ago. Galaxy far, far away. You know the drill.”

And to be fair, the new owners had ripped most of the interior up and redeveloped it to the point where only the surroundings were particularly familiar. Still, while that was enough to give the occasional unpleasant flashback, it was nothing a decent WA cab sauv merlot couldn’t deal with.

“Do Earth and Sea deliver out this far?” I wondered aloud.

“There’s one in Suffolk Park now,” Marty, the former local (he and Mads had sold their Watego’s Beach place some years ago) reported. Suffolk Park was the settlement immediately south of Byron itself; dB Entertainment had rented a holiday house at the southern end of Suffolk Park, near Broken Head, with the intent that we not sink three bottles of WA red at Firstlight and end up sleeping on the deck. Spoilsports.

“You’d better drive,” Marty muttered, tossing me the keys to the M5.

“I’ve had two, same as you,” I told him, not entirely sure why I’d picked that moment to look a 500bhp gift horse in the mouth.

“Yeah, but you can hold your piss, because you’re a big fat arse,” he explained scientifically.

He could say what he liked. I was the one with the keys to his 500bhp BMW M5. Admittedly it was only 400bhp unless you shut the whole thing down, pressed the magic ‘M’ button and started it all up again, and not a fuck was he going to let me do that, but 400 horses were more than plenty to propel us along and down down the narrow, ridge-running, tree-lined duration of St Helena Road, down to the junction with Bangalow Rd and the short descent into Suffolk Park. More than enough to convince Marty he didn’t really want me driving his BMW any more, it seemed. Still, I’d had fun, and we had plenty of time to discuss just how close we’d come to that oncoming cement truck over that blind crest while we waited for the girls to show up in the Camry. (Jeff had bone-headedly tried to hang with the M5, but given he was driving the farm ute with Phil on navigation duties, it was a wonder he didn’t end up in Nimbin.)

We grabbed pizzas from Earth and Sea and a few more bottles from the local – saving the good WA stuff for another night – and wandered down to the beach in the twilight. The flashbacks now were from a perfect Saturday, about ten years ago; Jessica’s twentieth birthday, as celebrated in the shallows down near that headland. Dammit. Still, I didn’t really have time to wallow in nostalgia. There was drinking and eating to be done. I was vaguely cheered to see Joey hoeing enthusiastically into a largely animal derived pizza; I was expecting hard-core veganism, so to see serious carnivorousness in the girl was an encouraging sight.

“Angus,” she said, “you’re cool with me taking the piss out of you, yeah?”

Joey, being concilatory? What was this? “Yeah, ‘course, why?”

“You don’t look that comfortable with it.”

Great, seems I’m more transparent than perspex these days. “Long day. Bit of unpleasant history in that place.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I’ve heard a few stories. Blame the circles I move in.”

“You move in circles? Like Jack Newton swimming?”

Joey chewed thoughtfully on a bit of pizza, blanking the joke completely. Strange as it might seem, she probably wasn’t the target demographic for Jack Newton references. “Well, you know Dan already, obviously. We go back a bit. Before she was Greg Richardson’s stepkid, she went to school the same place as me in Brisbane.”

“Where was that?”

“Somerville House,” she admitted, expecting the worst.

“The Fridge on the Ridge!” I declared. “Surprised you’re not more screwed up than you are…”

“You know it?”

“Course I know it. Those sick-green uniforms, those dodgy straw hats…”

“Ah so you’re an expert on Brisbane schoolgirls’ uniforms. That’s not fucking creepy in any way...”

“I knew a few Somerville girls from uni,” I said by way of fairly flimsy explanation.

“And what, some of them kept the uniform and wore it for you?”

“Well…”

“Don’t want to know actually.” Joey appraised me carefully. “That’s a fucking overshare waiting to happen... Then, when I moved down to Sydney, the first job I got was writing for street press. An old friend of yours was senior writer at the time.”

“If it’s the old friend I’m thinking of,” I remarked, “she’s not much of a friend of mine these days.”

“Maggie K?”

I nodded. We all had our pet names for her. Though the ones I wanted to use to describe her these days were primarily one-syllable and of Old Norse extraction.

“You should have a word to Danno,” she offered. “Ask her how much of a friend your girl was when it came time to cut a deal with Mads...”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“I know nothing...” she raised her hands with a wry smile.

God knew what that meant. I didn’t care much, anyway. Having Gasket play BDO was a no-brainer of monumental proportion, in my opinion. Anyone involved who seriously didn’t see the commercial benefit was talking out their arse. The mere fact that dB’s head honchos needed convincing, regardless by whom, was a black mark on their financial nous. In any case, around the time Lena would have been mentoring Joey – a worrying thought as it was – I’d have been long since off her radar, and as for Danno, she didn’t really know me particularly well.

“Knew you well enough not to sleep with you,” she pointed out. “And given I asked Lena’s opinion last week, I’d like to think it was relevant. A bit alcohol-affected, seeing as though it was New Years’ at Home, but vaguely up to date…”

What the fuck was Joey doing at Home? More to the point, what was Lena doing at Home? Neither seemed like the target demographic for Sydney’s premiere dance club, but I guess anything seems like a good idea after half a dozen vodkas and half a handful of disco biscuits.

“Still, I’m not buying any stories either of those two are telling about me.”

“Fair enough,” Joey demurred. “There was one other, though... You ever hear a band called Zen Ophelia? Out of Newcastle Uni?”

“…Yeah?”

“I… might have been at going through a Goth phase at the time,” she offered with a smile that could almost be described as embarrassed. “Clueless fucking first year arts student with a Robert Smith fetish…”

“Faaaaarrkkk me,” I remarked. “I remember now. We have met, haven’t we? I fucking knew it! Ni… nile…”

Joey rolled her eyes. “Nihilisa,” she admitted. “Everyone just called me Lisa. Which fucking annoyed me. Lisa’s not a name to conjure the end of all human civilization, now is it?”

“God, how old were you then?”

“Oh, seventeen?” she guesstimated. I guesstimated that if she was having trouble remembering exactly, there’d probably been as much substance indulgence backstage at Zen Ophelia shows as the on-stage performances suggested. Zen Ophelia had been Rachel’s mad flatmate Christa’s band back in Newcastle in ’03. Synth, theramin, a live drummer playing electronic kit, and two electric violas. First viola was our girl Christa, all Yahoo Serious hair and distinctly unserious world view. Second viola was Nihilisa, the sullen Goth. whose party piece was reading people’s lifelines and predicting their imminent and grisly deaths, along with those of all their loved ones. And knitting. Imagine if you will a seventeen-year-old Goth from Brisbane sitting on the roof of a grubby student squat in central Newcastle at 4am, wide eyed and wasted on backstage consumables, knitting sweaters. Well, someone told me it was actually corsets and bodices and Gothy sorts of fashionista shit, but personally I never wanted to get within needlepoint range just in case, so I never checked. After-gig parties at the Ghetto, the shambolic joint where the rest of the band lived (along with a cadre of musos, arts students and Felafel-esque randoms) were distinctly fucking insane, even by my own road-wearied standards. Rachel and I were usually relieved to have made it back to her place alive and unmolested…

“That’s right,” I recalled. “You were. Wasn’t there that story - I’m sure it was about you - about how you got picked up at the Bar on the Hill by an older guy, who turned out to be the cop who was there to bust underage drinkers...”

“First of all,” she declared, “I picked him up. And second, he’d never have found out if he hadn’t gone through my fucking wallet and found my learners’ when he was supposed to be picking his pants off the floor and fucking off home… what?”

“Nihilisa,” I grinned. “Maybe you can tell me what’s up with girls of a certain age treating their names as fashion accessories?” Artemisia and Desparia sprang to mind, not that Joey knew either. “Don’t like it, just pick another that the scenesters might like more...”

“Yeah, never wondered that myself, Angus,” she retorted. Hmmm, good point. “Think I’d prefer Cardinal fucking Fang. I’d almost repressed all memories of that, until I got landed with the aged care gig looking after you lot and I couldn’t remember why the fuck you seemed familiar…”

“Memorable, that’s me.”

“To be honest,” she admitted, “I was just glad to have figured out it wasn’t because we’d fucked, and I couldn’t remember.”

Which made two of us.

“Ah well,” I offered instead, “time enough if good enough...”

“That’s sexual harassment,” Joey pointed out. “And it’s pretty shit harassment at that. I’m insulted, I thought you fuckers were world’s best practice at objectifying women?”

“Nah,” I replied, “that was a fat fuck who used to live up the road from here.”

At which point, I realised with a wince, that if Joey and Rachel’s old flatmate had been mates, then Joey probably did know some stories about this place.